Like the natural forms that inspire them, Lucy Ruth Wright Rivers's bead tapestries draw beauty from imperfection. Using hundreds of multicolored beads, these intricate pieces call upon images of plants and flowers that the artist observes on her farm, and emphasize naturally-occurring color combinations that are at times beautiful, at times jarring, but always melodious. This relationship between conflict and coherence serves as a key theme in Wright Rivers's work, which also examines the ways in which movement and time affect the balance of one's environment.
Each tapestry develops organically from a single bead, a single form: though the artist begins with a vague notion of a desired end result, she encourages the work to expand naturally, allowing it to morph and change until reaching its own elaborate equilibrium. The process taken to create these remarkably complex pieces is as natural as its environmental inspiration--both are perfectly flawed.
